a few things i’ve liked, or found, or can’t shake in different forms
“The Bug Collector” by Haley Hendrickx
A song about trying to soothe someone you care about— to quell their anxieties, their traumas, their illnesses, to take all the fears that crawl in under the cracks in the window frame and make a home in your life, and to collect them all up in jars like little bugs. a song about wanting to ease someone’s thoughts, to give them the perfect morning.
Hendrickx has only released one full length, 2018’s I Need To Start A Garden, as well as a couple EP’s (bonus song: “The Park” from the Among Horses III EP). otherwise she appears to just be playing around Portland and assumedly living like any other 30ish person right now, just trying to keep the looming stresses of the world at bay. or maybe I’m just projecting.
“Coming to Jones Road Part II #7 Our Secret Wedding in the Woods” by Faith Ringgold
Coming to Jones Road Part II #7 Our Secret Wedding in the Woods, 2010. Acrylic on canvas with fabric border
Faith Ringgold passed away on April 12th of this year. In January, I was fortunate enough to see the last exhibit of her work shown during her lifetime, American People, a joint-curation between the New Museum and Chicago’s MCA. I was unfamiliar with Ringgold, a painter, sculpture and printmaker born in Harlem at the end of the Renaissance. There, in Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, her exhibit occupied the entire 4th floor, starting with her activist work in the 60s and 70s, working all the way thru her fabric collaborations with her mother, the fashion designer and seamstress Willi Jones, and into the abstracts Ringgold would explore after her mother’s passing. it was these abstracts whose story affected me most that day, being almost exactly a year after my own mother’s death, but in the months that followed I’ve kept thinking about her storyquilts. I wish I’d taken more time to really read each of them, instead of simply tilting my head to catch a line or two before diligently moving to the next piece.
The series Coming To Jones Road (referring to both her maiden name and the road off which she lived in Englewood, NJ, in the last part of her life) is the story of her great-grandmother, Aunt Emmy, a quilt-maker who escaped a plantation in search of freedom. This particular piece reads as follows, with all spelling and capitalization transcribed as its written on the quilt:
Whenever I feel sad I think about the day Barn Door and me got married in the Secret Church in the Woods. Then I forget to be sad. It was Aunt Emmy who took us to the Secret Church in the Woods when she and Uncle Tate got married. Barn Door and me were there but we were too young to know it was a secret. Everyone was so quiet we couldn’t hear what they were saying. For our wedding, Aunt Emmy made all our clothes and got the same preacher who married her and Uncle Tate to marry me and Barn Door. That day was a dream. I never thought we’d have no preacher weddin in the woods. On our wedding I was cryin and prayin we wouldn’t be caught. Everybody was cryin like somebody died. It was hard to be happy at our secret wedding then, but not now.
“Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” by Ross Gay
One of my favorite poetry recordings, and one I’d forgotten about until recently. A long, meditative, overflowing prayer of a piece by Ross Gay, recorded here with ambient music by Justin Vernon of Bon Iver
Read along if you’d like, or just let the sound of it fill your home, preferably on a yellow-windowed morning.
a moment:
and another:
Pierre Gagnaire cooks “Express Sauce” (or sauce Jean Vignard)
Following his recent press tour for The Taste of Things, I began diving back through Pierre Gagnaire’s history, which then derailed into a history of French sauces. This lead to eBaying used copies of Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire (1903) and James Paterson’s Sauces (1991). Neither book lists this sauce, which Gagnaire says he learned apprenticing under Jean Vignard. Jean Vignard, in turn, had cooked alongside Paul Bocuse under la Mère Brazier—Eugénie Brazier—the first person ever to win 6 Michelin stars with two simultaneous 3-star restaurants. That’s all to say: who knows where and when this sauce originated, but its complete lack of documentation outside of Gagnaire sharing it in this video is a perfect illustration of why culinary lineage is so important to look at when approaching the history of food and the significance of certain chefs. So much history and technique is passed directly from one person to the next, often undocumented in any outside form.
For a little more history on the Mères Lyonnaise (the Mothers of Lyon) and the essential work of those women in establishing the culinary capital, wikipedia is always a great place to start
For a little more Gagnaire, here is a contextless ~2min clip of absolute fucking chaos from Paul Lacoste’s 2000-2010 documentary series L’Invention de la Cuisine:
this is such a fun collection of things - i'll have to listen to that ross gay/bon iver collab!